The present invention relates to a novel glass cutting device and method for operating a motor driven glass cutting head on a platform.
Pieces of glass or lites normally employed with windows and doors are generally cut from large plates of glass. Prior art glass cutting devices have been developed to handle these large sheets of glass. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,790,003 and 3,881,618 describe tiltable glass cutting tables which may be employed to this end. The U.S. Pat. No. 3,570,733 describes a glass cutting table which employs air jets to permit the glass sheet to move easily on the top of the table.
In this regard, U.S. Pat. No. 4,171,657 describes a cutting machine which employs a cutting head movable in the X and Y directions. Drive motors fixed to a frame utilize belts which move the cutting head along predetermined paths. Also, this prior art device employs a numerical control signal to direct the cutting head in its cutting mode.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,331,050 and 4,380,944 describe cutting devices which employ digital computers to cut a particular material along a predetermined path. Russian Patent 727,581 discloses a moving sheet transverse cutting control apparatus which also includes a program for marking off and cutting the material. U.S. Pat. No. 4,422,149 and French Patent 2,484,393 describe cutting mechanisms which move along predetermined paths and generally have feedback systems to monitor the travel of the cutting head along the surface being cut.
Despite the advances in the prior art devices, a large amount of waste occurs in cutting glass sheets since efficient cutting of a multiplicity of lites from stock sheets of glass involves a great deal of calculating and planning. Moreover, it has been found that it is difficult to keep track of the lites which have been produced and the waste pieces which are a by-product of the cutting operations of the prior art. For example, waste pieces are often reuseable to produce desired lites but are often discarded because of the difficulty in retrieving and measuring of the same for reuse. Further, waste pieces are of a variety of sizes making categorization of the same difficult. At best, lites and waste pieces have been marked by hand after cutting which is a time consuming process.